Index

Agents love computers

I have been working on agent tooling for the last few months. Much of that work has involved tasks where both the outcome and the steps are clear. In those cases, choosing the tools in advance for the agents makes sense, you know what the agent has to do and you give access to the tools to accomplish the work (e.g. SEO improvements require access to GSearch console, openSEO and a couple skills).

But when you know the outcome but cannot predict every step necessary to accomplish it, what then? Giving an agent a persistent computer lets it choose how to get the work done.

We keep designing agents around the assistant model: we choose the tools and prescribe how they should work. To me, this feels like skeuomorphism, carrying a familiar interaction model into a technology that could support something different.

Early iBooks on iPad, with digital book covers arranged on wooden shelves

Early iBooks displayed digital books on wooden shelves. The books no longer needed a shelf, but the familiar design helped explain the new medium. Source: Glenn Fleishman, TidBITS, April 2010.

The idea of agents using computers is already established. Anthropic described this approach in 2024. What interested me here is how to provide agents with a minimal Linux desktop that persists between agent sessions. Files should still be there when the next session starts. Separate profiles should have their own storage, and multiple agents should be able to work in separate desktops at the same time.

I also prefer running these environments locally. Website access is one reason. I have run into sites blocking access from data-center environments, which can lead to extra work configuring proxies. Running locally does not guarantee access, but it allows human takeover easily as well to unstuck the agent when needed.

I built HotDesk around these requirements. It runs in Docker on a local machine and provides desktop environments with separate profiles and persistent storage. I can ask an agent to use HotDesk for a task and keep its working environment available across sessions.

Try HotDesk on a task of your own. GitHub.